Film based on
her work: The Terror of Dr. Mabuse (Werner Klingler 1962).

Born to a family
of wealthy nobles, Thea von Harbou broke away from a pampered life of leisure
in an unliberated age to launch her own independent career as a writer and
actress, while also leading a campaign to legalize abortion and promote woman's
rights. She soon garnered a reputation as one of her country's outstanding
screenwriters and crafted what are unquestionably the two most memorable
science fiction films of the silent era. Based on this description, one would
imagine that, today, von Harbou would be widely celebrated as a pioneering
feminist and major figure in film history; instead, she is routinely ignored
and belittled.

The reasons for
this neglect, of course, are not difficult to discern; for after she forged a
romantic and creative partnership with renowned director Fritz LANG, their
divergent political views (and their extramarital affairs) lead to a divorce in
the early 1930s, and while Lang fled from Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany to work
as an expatriate director in Hollywood, von Harbou stayed behind to become an enthusiastic
supporter of Nazism, contributing her talents to several propagandistic films
that now are understandably regarded as unwatchable. It is little wonder,
then, that film historians prefer to regard her landmark silent films as mostly
the work of Lang, whose genius purportedly enabled him to forge artistic
triumphs out of his wife's flawed, clumsy scripts. (Protip: if you want to earn
a lasting reputation as an important screenwriter, do not divorce a man regarded
as a major director in order to write paeans to the world's most notorious
dictatorship.)

However, despite
her unfortunate political proclivities, there remains the inconvenient truth
that, after divorcing his fascist wife and emigrating to America, Lang never
again made any films as memorable as Metropolis and Woman in
the Moon. And while I despise Hitler and his sympathizers as much as the
next man, I am driven to the conclusion that the brilliance of those films must
be attributed more to their author than to their director. Yes, von Harbou's stories
could lapse into illogic, bathos, and clichés, but
they did not burden Lang—they inspired him to do his very best work. For
despite her other deficiencies, von Harbou excelled in the one aspect of
literary craftsmanship that critics tend to ignore because it is utterly beyond
their ability to comprehend: the power of myth-making.

At first, von
Harbou applied her skills to traditional myths—in Destiny, an
anthology film featuring the traditional figure of Death, and Siegfried,
an adaptation of the Norse myth that features an amazing dragon—although Dr.
Mabuse, the Gambler merits attention as the film that first brought to
prominence the iconic figure of the dominating, technology-obsessed
supervillain. But the freedom that came from looking into the future engendered
von Harbou's greatest achievements. First was Metropolis, which stunned
audiences with its meticulous construction of a new sort of human society wherein
wealthy overlords lived in soaring skyscrapers while downtrodden workers
labored in vast underground chambers dominated by machinery, a realm that
nonetheless seems more fascinating than oppressive. Most provocatively, the
film declines to follow the pattern of dystopia, avoiding the predictable
conclusion of having its desperate citizens smash their enclosed civilization
to smithereens and escape to live above ground in a bucolic, natural setting.
Instead, while von Harbou's Metropolis is threatened with destruction, and is
in need of reforms, the film's resolution is to have future humanity accept its
transformed circumstances and work within them achieve some sort of resolution
that will preserve the city's futuristic structures while relieving the
miseries of its proletarians. H. G. WELLS may have famously
derided the film for various absurdities, but it both borrowed from Wells's own
The Time Machine (1895) and heavily influenced Wells's later, and
brighter, vision of subterranean life in Things to Come (1936). And almost
a century after its release, the film remains one of the rare science fiction
films—Arthur C. CLARKE
and Stanley KUBRICK's 2001:
A Space Odyssey is another—that stubbornly refuses to reject novelty and
reaffirm comforting traditions, rather forcing its characters, and its
audience, to accept the fact that the human condition is destined to change,
significantly and irrevocably, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Further praise
of Metropolis is unnecessary, since celebrations of the film are
ubiquitous, and it has remained one of the few silent films which are regularly
revived and reedited to astound a new generation of viewers; but the usually-overlooked
Woman in the Moon is a masterpiece as well. In the first place, this
film essentially created the significant subgenre of the realistic space film,
or spacesuit film, by endeavoring to show precisely how science and technology
might enable humans to travel to another world. To this day, its scenes of the
spaceship being launched to the Moon, supervised by rocket scientist Hermann
Oberth, seem more prescient than any other space films made before the
beginning of actual space flights. Yet this breakthrough film also went much
further than most of its successors in having its hero and heroine both travel
to the Moon and become the first residents of an alien planet. Indeed, the supposedly
tedious melodrama of the film's lengthy prologue, which establishes the
sympathetic or unsympathetic personalities of the future crew of the lunar
mission, can be said to convey the point that there are two types of human
beings—those with the strength, intelligence, and character to conquer space,
and those who lack those qualities—and their subsequent flight to the Moon and
sojourn on the lunar surface will function to separate those groups, as the
people who cannot handle the rigors of space—the evil Turner, frail Manfredt,
young Gustav, and cowardly Windegger—die or flee back to Earth, while the
virtuous Helius and Friede boldly choose to remain on the Moon, fully prepared
to endure the challenges of life on another world. In a different way, this
film recalls 2001 as well, as both stories focus on astronauts who
travel into space and never come back.

Unfortunately,
the early constraints of talking films forced the team of Lang and von Harbou
back to the present, and to lesser works, though there was one more noteworthy
achievement, M (1931), which almost qualifies as a horror film due to
the striking performance of Peter LORRE as a pursued child
molester, along with a second Dr. Mabuse film. But by this time, the couple had
separated, and they would officially divorce in 1933, as Lang
moved to America and von Harbou succumbed to the allure of Nazism. She kept working hard on a series
of realistic dramas and comedies that are rarely noted, even though a number of
them lacked the heavy-handed propaganda said to characterize her films of this
era, and she even managed to survive the fall of Hitler and continue writing
films after the war. But any hopes for her critical rehabilitation must rest
not on these later films but on the recent rediscovery and distribution of
nearly-complete versions of Metropolis and Woman in the Moon,
which may force scholars to reluctantly acknowledge that the person who crafted
their stories actually had something to do with their remarkable success.